From houses of worship to educational facilities and community theater, working with volunteers is a real challenge for any technician/engineer. Over the years, many of us here at Sweetwater have had the pleasure of coordinating well-intentioned, but often clueless, would-be live sound techs. And we’ve come up with a number of useful tips that have saved not only our sound systems but also our sanity. In broad strokes, these come down to providing solid training, making your system foolproof, and preventing volunteers from accessing certain settings and gear. We hope you find the following tips useful.
Don’t Assume Anything
This is both the most important rule and the hardest one to remember. For most of us, it’s almost impossible to remember a time when terms like XLR and gain didn’t mean anything to us, but you’ll need to use terms like “mic cable” and “volume” a lot when you work with untrained volunteers. What’s more, depending on how often new volunteers join the lineup, you may frequently have to start over from ground zero. Ultimately, it’s better to come off as pedantic and communicate clearly than it is to use technically correct terms or expect volunteers to use what you consider to be common sense and then spend your time frustrated and fixing mistakes.
Don’t Do It Yourself
Naturally, you’ll spend as much time as you can up front training volunteers, but the best and most effective training you can provide them is going to be on the job. Whether you’re setting up the stage or running the board, having your new volunteer shadow you is a great way to show him or her the ropes. However, this is where many lead engineers stall out, refusing to give up the reins. A large part of that is because they’re afraid that the volunteers will mess something up, which they inevitably will – and so did you when you were learning. Eventually you’ll have to trust your volunteers to run the show, so you might as well let them get started early when you know you’ll be right there to help out if the need arises.
Train Your Replacement/Backup
This goes hand in hand with rule two and is all the more critical if you yourself are a volunteer. Even if you’re the only staff member, one of the best things about having competent volunteers is that you can step away from your duties once in a while and know that the show will run smoothly. One of the best ways to achieve this is to identify who among your volunteers is catching on the quickest and groom that person to fill your shoes. It may take more effort up front, but spending the extra time training one or two volunteers in all aspects of the PA system will pay off in the long run.
Figure Out What Is and Isn’t Off-limits
One of the best ways you can keep your system running smoothly is to figure out which parts of it your volunteers should and shouldn’t be able to access. However, sorting out what gear/processors your regular volunteers need to access can be more complicated than you anticipate, and the list will change from system to system. So once you make those decisions and create a master list, then devise strategies for organizing and securing important parts of your PA to allow volunteers access only to the portions of the system that they need. Now you simply find a way to secure the parts that they could compromise or that could disable the system entirely.
Go Digital
In most cases, investing in a digital mixer is a totally worthwhile plan for any organization that relies on volunteers to run live sound. This may seem counterintuitive – after all, everyone knows that analog mixers are easier to get around than digital mixers. Actually, that’s exactly what makes digital mixers so useful for volunteer-run PAs. As opposed to analog boards, which include readily accessible knobs for every EQ band and aux send, most digital mixers use a single master channel control to tweak the settings for only the selected channel, and some even allow you to lock users out of those controls. What’s more, digital boards let you create presets, so an instantaneous recall of a certain setup allows the board to be immediately set up correctly. With nothing easily accessible except volume controls and mute switches, it’s much harder to destroy the mix.
Centralize Your Amps and Processors
While powered speakers are extremely convenient for many PA configurations, you may want to consider going with a traditional power amplifier and passive PA speaker setup. With your amplifiers in a rack, you can literally lock volunteers out of the master gain controls, which are easy to accidentally bump when setting up powered speakers. Whether there’s DSP built into your amplifiers or you have additional graphic EQs and other processors to tune the system, you can keep all your other processing locked up in the same rack and off-limits to anyone who has no business touching those settings.
Label Everything
Even if it has to come out of your own pocket, get your hands on a label maker and lots of label tape. Label everything. Every input, every output, both ends of every cable – if it can be unplugged (even if it shouldn’t be), then it needs a label. At the very least, this will allow anyone who can read to help set up when you can simply say, “Grab the cable labeled ‘Mic 1’ and plug it into the ‘Mic 1’ input on the stage box.” Likewise, if you regularly have to tear down and set up the same gear between performances, as is the case for house bands and worship teams, then you’ll want to use thin, brightly colored “spike” tape to mark on the stage where everything goes. This isn’t just handy for making sure that the PA speakers go in front of the stage; it can be critical for getting consistent sound so you don’t have to adjust settings at the board every time it is set up. Don’t be apologetic about making it look super simple and foolproof. In the end, it will save you lots of time and headaches.
Make a Cheat Sheet
One final tip is to make a set of instructions that your volunteers can use to get the PA at least operational in your absence. This sheet should minimally include a list of instructions of what gets plugged in where and how to recall or reset your main mixer preset. If you can, however, consider going into some extra detail. Imagine what one of your tech-savvy volunteers would need to know if you got lost in the jungle and couldn’t be reached for a month. If you have to guess, put it in the cheat sheet. We’d even recommend creating an online document in Google Docs or something similar so that it’s easy to keep it up-to-date, and your successor or other staff techs can add to it as necessary.
We hope you’ve found these tips and tricks useful for making your PA system volunteer-friendly. If you have specific questions about gear that could help you, then give us a call. Sweetwater Sales Engineers have countless hours of experience running and designing systems like these, and we’re always happy to help you find the gear you need. You can call us at (800) 222-4700.